Issue 2020-W19

Published on

Subscribe to new issues of the bulletin via the RSS feed or via email.

This week has been about product iterations, a programming language, convolutional neural networks, time sadness and a particular font.

# What is a Convolutional Neural Network?

An article introducing the concepts involved in a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and complemented with an interactive visualisation.

# Gleam

A programming language, statically typed and functional that compiles to Erlang VM with interoperability with other BEAM languages such as Elixir.

This week the team behind it has released version 0.8 with a noticeable improvement in developer experience.

# Structured Wrongness With the Suck Less Cycle

An article describing a lifecycle to frame how to iterate on a product reliably.

Building great software is not about being perfect. It’s about reliably making progress.

It's a better framed version of “perfect is the enemy of good” highlighting that although good enough is enough, the story doesn't end there.

After all, “quality is relative” without a framework to assess what you have done is just accepting you don't care about the result, you only care about getting away with it.

# Time in Unix

An article that will challenge your trust on time and its implementation in computer systems.

[…] in Unix time, each day is considered to be exactly 86400 SI seconds, which would mean it should skew away from real UTC, and thus drifts away from UT1 (mean time).

# Scunthorpe Sans

A font that censors bad language automatically.

# PostgreSQL count(*) made fast

An article about the quirks of Postgres' count function.